Volume 47, Number 20 · December 21, 2000
Hometown America's Black Book
By Larry McMurtry
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
by James Allen, by Hilton Als, by John Lewis, by Leon F. Litwack
Twin Palms, 209 pp., $60.00
Pick a horror—perhaps the Bulgarian horror of 1876, which upset Queen Victoria very much, and didn't help Mr. Gladstone's lumbago, either. Mr. Gladstone wrote a pamphlet, pointing out that the Turks had done things to the Bulgarians that 'might almost make Hell blush.' The Turks, unimpressed, promptly did even worse things to the Armenians. There were more horrors, more pamphlets, including one by the young Arnold Toynbee. All through the twentieth century, as bodies stacked up like posts across the landscapes of Europe, Asia, Africa, earnest commissions trudged off, with cameras and adding machines, to photograph the bodies, count them, compile black books; the commissions are busy still.
Review, 2146 words
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